If there is a striking positive thing that has emerged from Nigeria’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic, it is the fact that Africa’s biggest economy can achieve more when there is a collaborative effort between the private and the public sector, with the latter creating an enabling environment for the former to operate.
This was the view of various stakeholders in the country’s health-care sector who spoke at a webinar session put together by BusinessDay, West Africa’s leading business paper, in collaboration with MTN, Nigeria’s biggest non-oil foreign direct investment, on Wednesday.
The stakeholders, who spoke on the topic “Financing healthcare in Nigeria”, said universal health care coverage can only be achieved if the collaborative efforts seen between the private sector and the government in the fight against the spread of the coronavirus are sustained.
The webinar session, the third in the series, which hosted over 600 business leaders in both Nigeria and abroad, was moderated by Pamela Ajayi, chief executive officer of Synlab Health Care and anchor of a famous radio programme, ‘Doctors on air’.
“The coronavirus pandemic has shown to us is that Nigeria can mobilise the needed capital to finance its health care system when it realises the importance,” Uche Orji, CEO, Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority.
Orji said the pandemic showed that Nigeria was never prepared in terms of strategy to deal with communicable diseases, hence more investments have to be channelled in that area.
He revealed that the $1 billion spent by Nigerians annually on medical tourism was spent on four main diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer and surgery.
The novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 2.6 million people and caused over 181,000 deaths worldwide, started in Wuhan, China late last year and entered Nigeria after an index case flew into the country from Milan sometime in February.
The virus, which has infected over 782 persons and led to 25 deaths in Nigeria as at 6:00pm on Wednesday, has also exposed the country’s failed health care system. It also laid bare the country’s neglect for both its manufacturing and pharmaceutical sectors due to the high appetite for foreign products.
There is also evidence of a weak pharmaceutical supply chain, though not just in Nigeria but globally, Orji said, as there was too much dependence on China and India, and this affected drug supplies to major countries of the world as the source countries enacted a lockdown of economic activities.
With the outbreak of the virus in the country, private sector players swept into action after it became glaring that both the federal and state governments were handicapped in terms of the financial power to wage the impending health and economic war that the country was going into due to the spread of the virus.
From donation of billions of cash to building of hundreds of isolation centres across the country, and provision of various testing and medical kits, the private sector threw its weight behind the government in working to curb the spread of the virus, in a way and manner that has never been seen before, prompting stakeholders to say such collaborative nature between the private and public should be welcomed.
“The collaboration that has so far been seen between the private and public sector in propelling the growth of the health sector must be a continuous and sustainable one, and should not be based on emergency,” said Tope Adeniyi, CEO, Axa Mansard Health Insurance.
Adeniyi said a better way to achieve universal health coverage was by having a working health insurance scheme.
According to him, adoption of the health insurance scheme must be built on trust which must be the benchmark for everyone in the value chain, both operators and regulators.
“Regulators of the health insurance scheme must strengthen the framework backed with technology, to ensure that players (HMOs) are held accountable and responsible as that would ensure there is trust in the system,” he said.
While responding to questions on whether the Cuban health care system can effectively work in Nigeria, Adeniyi said the Cuban model was successful because there was accountability in the process with operators, regulators and players setting key performance indicators that they must achieve.
Nasir Sambo, executive secretary, NHIS, explained his office was working to improve the quality of health care services through the health insurance scheme.
According to him, there are three basic ways in which a country can attract health care financing. These include resource mobilisation, resource pooling, and resource allocation and tracking. He also said the financing can come from public and/or private sector, and can be by funding from tax revenues, deficit financing, donor financing, and social health insurance schemes.
He noted that the social health insurance scheme is the most equitable and most profitable of them all as it allows the rich in a country to subsidise health-care services for the poor by pooling risk and resources together.
MICHAEL ANI & BUNMI BAILEY
